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2 F v r n th ll n : Th H h ld d t n, th h p R pr nt, nd th P th ll tr t n nd R pt n f h rl D n Chris Louttit Book History, Volume 17, 2014, pp (Article) P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t Pr DOI: /bh For additional information about this article Access provided by Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (17 Feb :44 GMT)

3 A Favour on the Million The Household Edition, the Cheap Reprint, and the Posthumous Illustration and Reception of Charles Dickens Chris Louttit In A Hundred Years of Publishing, his history of Chapman and Hall, Arthur Waugh calls the Household Edition of Charles Dickens s Works one of the most ambitious ventures that the firm had faced for years. 1 The professional memoir of the engravers for the project (the Dalziel Brothers) is equally keen to stress its notability, describing it as by far the most important commission ever placed in our hands by Messrs. Chapman & Hall. 2 Since the early years of the twentieth century, however, Dickens s critics and readers have largely ignored the apparent significance of this new, complete edition of Dickens, reset in large type on a quarto page, and furnished with entirely new illustrations by a fresh set of artists 3 which appeared between 1871 and 1879 in weekly numbers (at 1d.), monthly parts (at 6d.), and volume form (at between 2s. and 4s., depending on novel length). 4 This critical neglect derives in part from an absence of archival evidence relating to Chapman and Hall s reasons for launching the venture and precise data about its production and sales. 5 The lack of attention given to the Household Edition can also be ascribed to the greater (and indeed deserved) focus on the implications of the original publication history of Dickens s fiction as serial parts and in his weekly magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. As Robert L. Patten has pointed out, reconstructing the history of Dickens s serial texts can tell us much about his art, his readers, and his fame. 6 It does not, however, tell the whole story since, as Patten also reminds us, serialization was not the format in which the majority of Dickens s readers have read his fiction, so in terms of reception it may be irrelevant to most people s experiences of his work. 7 This point, of course, is even more pertinent in considering the experiences of Dickens s fiction after A thorough analysis of the publication history of the Household Edition can provide further insight into this posthumous reception of Dickens. The responses of two very different readers of the edition offer initial evidence of Dickens read in the context of this 1870s republication of his

4 322 Book History works. The first memory comes from the letters of Vincent van Gogh. Born in 1853 in North Brabant and resident in France in the last years of his life, Van Gogh also lived in England for 3 full years between 1873 and 1876, working first for the art dealer and publisher Goupil & Cie and later briefly as a teacher. 8 Having returned to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1877 he wrote his younger brother Theo, an art dealer, of his memories of Booksellers Row, which is full of all kinds of bookstalls and shops where one sees all kinds of things, from etchings of Rembrandt to the Household edition of Dickens and Chandos Classics. 9 As much as this remark might seem merely a fond remembrance of a fleeting moment of pleasure taken at a bookseller s window, it is significant in this context because it provides firm evidence that, in the middle of the 1870s, it was the Household Dickens that was on public display. The collected letters also tell us that Van Gogh maintained a fondness for Dickens and the work of the Household Edition illustrators long after his years in England; in a letter written to his friend Anthon van Rappard in March 1883, for example, he announced I m gradually coming round to the idea of taking the English Household Edition. 10 (At that point he owned a French edition.) Van Gogh, in fact, was an ardent admirer both of mid-victorian novelists like Dickens and George Eliot, and of the generation of social realist, black-and-white artists who contributed to the London Illustrated News, the Graphic, and other illustrated papers (some of whom also drew for the plates of the Household Edition). 11 As we shall see later, Van Gogh s correspondence shows detailed engagement with individual images, as well as a brief assessment of the merits of the illustrators of the Household Dickens in relation to earlier ones. Our second reader of the edition is, however, rather different. Edwin Pugh, born in London in 1874, was a clerk, novelist, short-story writer, and critic. In his socialist study Charles Dickens: The Apostle of the People, Pugh claimed that many of us first read Dickens in the green-covered, large-paper Household edition, as the present writer did. Pugh makes it clear, though, that, unlike Van Gogh, he did not even encounter the original plates until later in life. For him, therefore, the Household artists illustrations of Dickens seemed as inevitably right and fitting as brown crust to a white loaf of bread. I had a feeling of finality about them. I could conceive of no other presentment of Dickens s characters as being even possible. 12 Since we have become so used to the original illustrations (and their importance to our understanding of Dickens) this seems a rather peculiar statement. Importantly, however, it provides significant first-hand evidence of Pugh s initial experience of Dickens through the Household Edition with its new illustrations. His phrasing,

5 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 323 moreover, strongly suggests that there were other readers like him ( many of us ) in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. What follows therefore attempts to reconstruct the story of this great, posthumous popular success. My assessment of the edition is based upon pertinent evidence from a number of diverse sources, including the trade press and publishers memoirs, the physical form and appearance of the edition itself in relation to other (popular) reprints and periodical publications, and the reception and afterlife of the edition and its new illustrations in the popular and local press, in exhibitions, and on the music hall stage. In surveying this terrain, my article sets out, in the first instance, to develop what we know about Dickens s status and reception in the decades immediately following his death. Central to the discussion is a reassessment of what is currently known about the illustration of Dickens s novels. Since, as Robert L. Patten has pointed out, there have been no comprehensive assessments of the illustrations... to reprints or editions published after Dickens s death, one of my intentions is to bring much needed attention to one of the most significant popular editions (and new illustrations produced for it) published after Dickens s death. 13 Seen at close quarters, this article argues, the market for Dickens illustration as it existed between 1871 and the early decades of the twentieth century is rather different from the one that slowly emerged after the Second World War. This market functioned in relation to two things in particular: the phenomenon of the inexpensive reprint series, and changing attitudes towards realism in literature and the visual arts. My detailed analysis of the Household Edition therefore revises our understanding not only of Dickens s reception, but also of both of these contexts. The specific case study I develop here aims, finally, to open up more general discussion of how neglected popular editions such as this one played a significant role in the shaping of an author s posthumous reputation in the late Victorian period. The beginnings of the Household Edition can be traced to calls for a truly popular and affordable edition of Dickens that were being voiced even before Dickens s death. A letter to the editor of the Daily News, dated July 2, 1868, gives evidence of the feelings of one working man on the subject. Drawing attention to the important boon granted to the million by cheap editions produced by firms such as Black s and Routledge, the author asks earnestly if C. Dickens, Esq.,... could confer such a favour on the million. He continues, That Mr. Dickens has a three shilling edition of his various works is true enough; but what I want is a sixpenny or a shilling edi-

6 324 Book History tion of them, by which I believe he would confer a boon on more than one WORKING MAN. 14 Following Dickens s death in June 1870 and the rush of memorials to the man and his work, it is sensible to assume that such calls would not only continue but become increasingly attractive to Dickens s publisher. In the final chapter of Charles Dickens and His Publishers Robert L. Patten suggests another quite specific possible influence on Chapman and Hall, an obituary article in The Graphic, June 13, 1870, which noted, much like the letter-writing working man in the Daily News, that there have never been in this country anything like those cheap popular editions which have secured to other writers so enormous a sale. For this reason the fame of Dickens is still chiefly confined to the middle and upper classes. 15 Patten s hunch about the influence of the Graphic obituary is made all the more convincing when it is read alongside the prospectus for the edition printed in the Publishers Circular. Seemingly in response to readers like the Graphic critic and our working man, this announced succinctly that Messrs. Chapman and Hall trust that by this Edition they will be enabled to place the works of the most popular British author of the present day in the hands of all English readers. 16 As much as this may sound like publisher s hyperbole, surviving evidence suggests Chapman and Hall were successful in finding a large audience for their new popular edition. Reports of its sales are by no means exhaustive and are generally unclear about the difference between the weekly numbers, monthly parts, and volumes. What seems certain, however, is that the edition enjoyed very high sales at the beginning of its run with the publication of Oliver Twist in June 1871 (Figure 1). On July 12, 1871, the Derby Mercury told its readers that, rather impressively, 100,000 copies of the first part of the Household Edition of Dickens s Works... were sold within two days of the publication. 17 A letter from Anthony Trollope (a shareholder in the firm) to Frederic Chapman does not state whether the numbers or the parts sold better, but suggests sales in the range of 200, By the winter of 1871 sales of the numbers had settled at about 150,000 copies according to one source, and even above 150,000 copies according to another. 19 With the publication of the Household David Copperfield a year later, better than 83,000 were sold, 20 but after this point it is very difficult to find information about sales figures for the edition. It seems likely that, after the initial peak of interest in 1871, sales would have leveled off at between 80,000 and 100,000, but it is entirely possible that this number might only represent weekly numbers or monthly parts rather than a clear assessment of total sales. Nevertheless it is worth pointing out that even these sketchy figures compare favorably with sales of Dickens s monthly numbers during

7 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 325 Figure 1. Household Edition volume binding for Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1871). Author s collection. his lifetime the 34,000 parts of Bleak House sold each month in 1852 and 1853, for example, or the 1847 Cheap Edition s average weekly sale of 30,000 numbers. 21 Rough and relatively conservative estimates of the popularity of the entire edition suggest that, if 100,000 parts were consistently purchased each month and 100,000 numbers each week, about 10,000,000 parts and 40,000,000 numbers would have been sold by the end of the run in Again, this compares strongly with the 8,500,000 numbers of the first series of the Cheap Edition sold by 1870, and the 4,239,000 volumes of the Charles Dickens Edition sold in the twelve years after Dickens s death. 22

8 326 Book History Chapman and Hall had, of course, sufficient experience to turn the venture into a great publishing success. As Patten has pointed out, During Dickens s lifetime his writings appeared in a bewildering variety of editions, each designed to attract its own class of customers, to work its special segment of the market. 23 With their long association with Dickens stretching back to 1836, Chapman and Hall would have understood the different sections of his readership well. The fact that they were keen to make money out of their recently-deceased star performer has been made clear by Arthur Waugh, who claimed that, after the strong sales of the Charles Dickens Edition in 1867, Frederic Chapman was not going to rest content with a single popular edition. 24 The title and publication frequency of this new popular edition suggest two clear influences taken from past, successful strategies in publishing Dickens. The first was the Cheap Edition, first published by Bradbury and Evans in 1847, but subsequently taken on by Chapman and Hall in the 1860s. In his Prospectus to the edition, Dickens ardently wished that it would be hoarded on the humble shelf where there are few books, and... lie about in libraries like any piece of household stuff. 25 In aiming to take up such a prominent position in the humble home, the Cheap Edition was published in multiple forms: in weekly numbers (at 1½d.), monthly parts (at 7d.), and volumes (at between 2s. 6d. and 5s.). 26 The second influence on Chapman and Hall was Dickens s highly successful journals. As J. Don Vann suggests, in naming it the Household Edition Chapman and Hall were playing on the public s fond memories of Dickens s magazine Household Words. 27 What also seems clear is that they wanted to emulate the effectively versatile, multiple ways in which that journal (and its successor) were published. As Lorna Huett s recent thorough study tells us, Household Words and All the Year Round employed a combination of the publishing practices from both ends of the marketplace. Numbers were initially published weekly, but were subsequently reissued both as semi-annual indexed volumes, and as paper covered monthly parts. 28 The Household Edition therefore adopted the same number, part, and volume approach as the Cheap Edition and Household Words. In fact (like the Cheap Edition) it offered further options for the potential consumer of Dickens in the form of two methods of volume release: the distinctive green cloth and gilt boards (which adorn many of the volumes in circulation today) at 4s., and a cheaper stiff paper wrapper priced at 3s. 29 The effect, subtly refined, is therefore similar to what, according to Huett, had been achieved with the forms in which Household Words and All the Year Round were produced: a distinct ambiguity or hybridity created by the fact

9 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 327 that on the one hand they were given an honorific treatment at their publication in semi-annual volume form, ready for inclusion in the most respectable library; on the other, they rubbed shoulders with the most disreputable forms of cheap literature while appearing in penny weekly numbers. 30 In the case of the Household Edition this ambiguity is made particularly evident by its reception in the pages of the Graphic. In the July 15, 1871 issue, the edition s first monthly portion is noted in the Magazines for July column besides such publications as Leisure Hour, the Sunday at Home, Good Words, and Good Words for the Young. 31 In the Graphic of November 29, 1873, however, the volume release of Little Dorrit ( ) is mentioned in New Novels alongside Gabriel Denver by Oliver Madox- Brown and Up Hill by Lady Wood. 32 Thorough analysis of the shape and appearance of the different formats in which the Household Edition appeared provides further evidence of Chapman and Hall s particularly savvy strategies in targeting slightly different parts of the market. Since, in the first instance, Dickens s works were rereleased in paper covers to a weekly and monthly schedule, it is easy to see why they were classified along with other periodical publications in the Magazine column in the Graphic. This interpretation is made all the more convincing once the look of its individual pages has been considered. Much like Household Words, the Household Edition contained double column pages with double rules around the type. Unlike the unillustrated Household Words, however, the pages also included woodcut plates in the text. This suggests, therefore, that Chapman and Hall wanted not only to evoke the public s fond memories of Dickens s magazine, but also to associate the serialized parts and numbers of the Household Edition with the spate of weekly and monthly illustrated journals that began to appear after the abolition of stamp duty in The fact that the numbers and parts were densely illustrated would also have offered novelty to those used to the pictureless and rather plain installments of the Cheap Edition. Chapman and Hall made sure to connect the edition to the type of illustration popular in the period by hiring the Dalziel Brothers to superintend the commissioning and engraving of the images to appear in the edition. The stable of illustrators they brought with them, including Frederick Barnard, Charles Green, James Mahoney, and F. A. Fraser, contributed extensively to a wide range of the illustrated papers, including the Argosy, Once a Week, Good Words, London Society, the Quiver, Leisure Hour, and Sunday at Home. 33 The fact that these artists all employed the now-dominant realistic 1860s style of wood-engraving in these journals and also in the Household Edition there-

10 328 Book History fore creates a significant connection between this first popular posthumous edition of Dickens and the illustrated periodicals of the time. 34 The illustration of the Household Edition parts by diverse hands working in a similar style also emphasizes the idea that it is closer to a miscellaneous magazine format than to an edition illustrated by a single, authorized artist. This reading of Chapman and Hall s publishing strategies reveals, therefore, a clever attempt to align Dickens with the periodical and visual culture of the 1870s. Dickens, in other words, is brought up-to-date and contextualized for the moment, rather than being historicized and associated with the by then old-fashioned style of fine-grained, satirical engraving favored by the original illustrators of Dickens. In this context Dickens would likely appeal more strongly to a generation of readers who, like Pugh, had not experienced the publication of Dickens s serial and first volume editions in previous decades. In shaping the appearance of the edition, however, it is clear that this is not the only association Dickens s publisher wanted to evoke. The cover of each of the 101 monthly numbers, in fact, clearly refers back to the wrappers of the original serial novel installments (see Figure 2). More specifically, the composition and style of Gordon Thomson s design and the pale blue paper on which it is printed closely resembles the serial wrappers to later novels like Bleak House ( ) and Our Mutual Friend ( ). With the Household Edition monthly numbers Chapman and Hall were, then, not only playing on the public s fond memories of Household Words, but also attempting to arouse the happy remembrances of older readers of the serial runs. When analyzed more closely, moreover, the relationship between the Household Edition monthly numbers and the original serials becomes more complex. The Household wrapper itself, to begin with, does not function as a suggestive overture to the exciting events of a single as-yet-unfinished novel as the original covers did. Rather, as one review noted, it was a clever design, including the figures of old friends. 35 This last point is significant, and reminds us that, whether in the pages of his novels or second-hand via Victorian popular entertainment, many older readers would already have encountered characters, scenes, and plots from Dickens. Thus, one element of the experience of reading a serial novel, what Linda Hughes and Michael Lund call the requirement for readers to stay with a story a long time and to postpone learning a story s outcome, and what Matthew Rubery has more recently labeled long reading, would not have applied in exactly the same way. 36 Those who had read Dickens before, in fact, would have been driven not by a sense of anticipation about what was soon to occur,

11 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 329 Figure 2. Gordon Thomson s monthly number wrapper design for The Works of Charles Dickens: Household Edition (Part 70, April 1877). Author s collection. but rather a feeling of pleasure in returning to familiar fictional territory (to those old friends, as Fun put it). Aspects of the form of the Household numbers, moreover, certainly suggested a lack of urgency. Rather than being preceded by two full-page illustrations as in the serial parts which served in some sense to forecast the excitements of that month s installment, each monthly number of the Household Edition included illustrations within the text to punctuate rather than predict the action; in the longer novels, in fact, there was one inserted to a regular rhythm on every eighth page. And, rather than providing three complete chapters like the original serials, the text of the Household numbers finishes, without fanfare or climactic scene and usually mid-chapter and sometimes even mid-sentence, once the month s sixty four pages of double-columned print have been filled. What this suggests is that the monthly numbers of the Household Edition functioned as a collect-

12 330 Book History ible series rather than a self-contained serial part, one that could eventually be stored or bound quite cheaply to build up a complete set of Dickens s works. 37 Further consideration of Gordon Thomson s wrapper design reveals other clear interpictorial allusions. It is certainly obvious that it refers not only to the design and format of the serial covers but also to well-known vignettes created by the original illustrators. His illustrations self-consciously refer to famous spatial and architectural scenes from the originals, such as Phiz s drawing of Peggotty s boathouse from the frontispiece of David Copperfield ( ) and Marcus Stone s atmospheric image of the Thames and London skyline from the Our Mutual Friend serial wrapper. Gathered around the title, Works of Charles Dickens, Household Edition, are depictions of a number of Dickens s most famous characters. Each of the character sketches very clearly looks back to well-known illustrations by the first artists. In the bottom right corner, for example, we see a reprise of the figures of Miss Betsey and young David from Hablot Browne s I Make Myself Known to My Aunt from Chapter 12 of David Copperfield. 38 And, just above them in the middle of the page, Bill Sikes hangs on to a rope from a roof-top very much as he does in George Cruikshank s image The Last Chance, which illustrates a scene from Chapter 50 of Oliver Twist ( ), the only real difference being the absence of Bullseye on the roof. When the Fun reviewer called this a clever design, including the figures of old friends, these friends, then, were as much the creation of Cruikshank and Browne as Dickens himself. 39 The presentation of this gathering of figures from Dickens s imagination as illustrated by the original artists also makes reference to a more recent source: the pictorial tributes in the press that commemorated Dickens s death in June Images such as the Household Edition illustrator Fred Barnard s Charles Dickens s Legacy to England, which appeared in Fun on June 25, 1870, and Walter Browne and John Tenniel s The Empty Chair, published in Judy on June 22, also contain galleries of Dickens s people gathered around their creator (or the empty chair that stands in for his lost presence). Viewing these particular tributes in the context of other images of authors, Leon Litvack has claimed that Dickens was the visible embodiment of authorship; his highly individuated and visualised characters were confirmation of his legacy. 40 The second part of this statement is equally true, of course, of Thomson s drawings on the Household Edition wrapper. What is different is that the portraits of Dickens or of his empty chair have been replaced; instead there is now a stack of books rep-

13 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 331 resenting his now completed works. Sprouting out of this pile of novels are the branches that are used by Thomson to divide up the different parts of his composition. These might also be interpreted as a means of signaling that his famous characters grow out of the sound knowledge of his fiction that a popular edition can provide. In other words, it is a representation of Dickens s fiction, and implicitly the Household Edition itself, rather than any authorial portrait that can now be seen as his real posthumous legacy. This close reading of Thomson s image suggests, therefore, that there is something more at work in the presentation of the Household Edition cover than a commercially-minded attempt to make it appeal to new readers, like Edwin Pugh, who were more familiar with the Sixties visual style than the original work of Browne and Cruikshank. Another detail from the wrapper design confirms this point. Above the copies of Dickens s novels hang two branches of laurel leaves. These connote valor and triumph, of course, and in the context of the design they cast Dickens s work as the productions of a popular laureate. This small feature of Thomson s image, then, highlights the fact that, as well as a way to turn a fast profit, the Household Edition is represented here as a celebration of Dickens s greatness. Such a reading of the laurels resting above his novels is, moreover, confirmed by other publishing contexts in which we can place the volume (rather than part or number) publication of the edition. Its presentation in bound quarto-sized green cloth volumes with black and gold decoration while the serial parts and numbers were appearing, to borrow the words of Laurel Brake, fosters its association with books and with the status of literature rather than the ephemeral and commercial dimension of periodical publication. 41 In a passing remark in his book Victorian Illustration, the modern critic of illustration Paul Goldman comments on the mediocre paper and unpleasing appearance of the Household Edition. 42 Some critics at the time agreed with him. The review in the Graphic, for example, commented that Little Dorrit, which forms the new volume in the Household Edition of Charles Dickens works,... has not been fortunate in its illustrator, Mr. J. Mahony. 43 The reviewer in the Glasgow Herald was less barbed in his judgment, but nonetheless strongly suggested the aesthetic inferiority of the edition. He claimed that There are a number of woodcuts, not of the highest class certainly, but they will enliven the page for the class of readers for which the edition is mainly designed. 44 Close attention to reviews in the popular and local press demonstrates, however, that many other critics responded more favorably, contextualizing the edition in relation to other popular reprints rather than productions of the sixties school of illustration. Surveying the

14 332 Book History week s literature in late November 1872, for example, the Bell s Life in London critic provides a detailed positive response to the appearance of the Household David Copperfield in volume form. Interestingly, the physical appearance of the text receives plenty of attention. The critic explains to his readers that It is quarto size, and printed in double columns. The type is clear, and a good margin is preserved. 45 He even concludes his short review with the claim that the book is so handsome that it will form an admirable present for a birthday festival, or even bridal gift. 46 Many others writing notices about the Household Edition in the early 1870s strongly agreed. Thus, in reviewing the first part of the series in 1871, the Derby Mercury claimed that The size, the clearness and beauty of the printing... afford promise that this will be the popular edition of the great novelist s books. 47 In 1872 the Dundee Courier and Argus greeted the arrival of an excellent and large edition, printed in a fine clear type. 48 A year later Freeman s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser noted that the volume publication of Bleak House was portly and well-printed. 49 What is consistent in these notices is the way in which they draw attention to the high quality and the large size of the edition. Such responses emphasize the fact that, with its relatively solid girth, the Household volumes provide an example of a particular sort of popular edition. Richard D. Altick argued that the tendency of publishers by about 1850 was already towards a reduction in the size of reprint series. Altick explained that, by the 1840s and 1850s, larger formats became distinctly inconvenient, and that as reading was increasingly practiced outdoors and in public vehicles, pocket-sized volumes became more and more necessary. 50 Such changes in patterns of readings hastened the arrival of series like George Routledge s compact and bright Railway Library, which first appeared in 1848 and spawned numerous imitators. 51 In this context, it can be argued that the choice of the name of the Household Edition was entirely deliberate. It may well have evoked associations of Dickens s journal published in the 1850s, and even referred to the frequent connection of Dickens s fiction with domestic virtues. But it also seems to signal the fact that, in volume form, the edition was meant not to provide inexpensive, disposable entertainment for commuters, nor to function as a handsome, more expensive Library Edition. (In the 1870s, Chapman and Hall catered to this part of the market by bringing out the thirty-volume octavo-sized Illustrated Library Edition, which reproduced the original plates and was priced at 10s. a volume. 52 ) The Household Edition volumes were instead suited perfectly to the small home libraries of the working classes and lower middle-class. In his Intro-

15 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 333 ductory Note to Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, a 1908 reprinting of all the Household illustrations, Arthur Waugh claimed evocatively that, even then, The original copies [could] still be met with, under many a country timbered roof, carefully treasured as one of the most cherished household possessions. 53 And when the edition first came out, one reviewer explained away its inconvenient size by noting that this issue is meant for the poor man s home, where one shall read to many. 54 By presenting the Household Edition in varied formats, Chapman and Hall managed to market it simultaneously as a collectible memorial to a beloved popular author and as a part of the contemporary periodicals scene. What beyond this, then, does the reillustration of Dickens by new artists, which was so central to this edition, tell us about the popular response to the great author in the years immediately following his death? A number of critics, among them Jane Rabb Cohen, Michael Steig, and Robert Patten, have made us fully aware of how central the original illustrations are to a complete understanding of Dickens s fiction. 55 Dickens and the artists who worked with him not only belonged to the same graphic tradition, but also shaped texts that were at once verbal and visual. Patten expresses this reading of the function of illustration well in assessing Hablot Browne s plates for David Copperfield. Rather than merely supplementary or decorative, Patten argues, Browne s images are an indispensable, integral part [of the serial], necessary to the complex interweaving of contradictory tones and epistemic structures and times and images of self that the serial performs for and on its readers. Thus, in more general terms, the majority of Dickens s serials are resonant dialogues between pictures and text. 56 The fresh set of artists engaged to produce entirely new illustrations for the Household Edition had, therefore, to respond in some way to the integral role played by Hablot Browne, George Cruikshank, John Leech, and the other original illustrators in shaping the public understanding of Dickens s works. Gareth Cordery has claimed that Harry Furniss, another artist who illustrated Dickens after his death, was freed from the direct influence of Dickens in a way that the original illustrators were not. Nonetheless, he still had to confront the powerful and established iconography of the latter. 57 We can claim much the same of illustrators like Fred Barnard and Charles Green, and even suggest that, given that they were working much closer to Dickens s lifetime, the influence of the original illustrators would have been greater than that on Furniss. The Household illustrators had,

16 334 Book History moreover, not only to deal as artists with the resonant dialogues between pictures and text created by Dickens and his original illustrators, but also to respond to the fact that, for many older readers, the work of the first illustrators was utterly inseparable from the words of the great novelist. As Jane Cohen has explained, Most late nineteenth-century readers shared [George] du Maurier s nostalgic recollection of Dickens s creations, which for them had been fixed, crystallized, and solidified into imperishable concrete by those little etchings in that endless gallery, printed on those everwelcome pages of thick yellow paper. 58 A fragment of evidence thus far unnoticed by critics helps develop such suggestions about the difficulties faced by the Household Edition artists in responding to Dickens s first illustrators. It is a short extract taken from The Tatler, a gossip column with an artistic bent published in Bell s Life in London, which refers to the recent 1883 exhibition of Hablot Browne s work at the Liverpool Art Club. 59 The author of the column quotes an address given at the exhibition by Mr. Edgar A. Browne on the artistic character of Hablot K. Browne. The former happened to have received notes about Phiz s art from the Household illustrators Charles Green and Fred Barnard, and the author quotes them at length in his report since both are peculiarly interesting. This is what Green said: I remember when I was a small boy one of my first art pleasures was derived from Phiz, and this has grown stronger with me ever since, as I have become better able to appreciate the many beauties in his drawings. I think there is nothing to come up to the illustrations to Dickens and Lever, not only for character and humour, but also intense pathetic feeling. I was a few years ago asked to illustrate The Old Curiosity Shop, and never did I feel I was undertaking such a difficult task when I felt I was coming after what had been done so exquisitely before. Barnard s tribute, on the other hand, is described quite perceptively as being to the full as enthusiastic, while it is more analytical. He remarks of Phiz that, however repulsive and even squalid the subject may be, there is always the same charming undercurrent of graceful composition. In everything he touched you can always feel that a keen sense of beauty was at the bottom of it. 60 The comments of Green and Barnard are clearly meant as appreciations of Browne s talents, with both illustrators attaching particular value to the beauty of his compositions. This admiration of their great forebear aside,

17 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 335 however, there are revealing differences in how each man explains the challenge of illustrating Dickens after Browne. In Green s case the dominant note is one of anxiety and difficulty ( never did I feel I was undertaking such a difficult task ) in the face of a sense of belatedness ( coming after ) as a Dickens illustrator. Barnard, in contrast, does not directly mention any feelings about his own task in coming after Phiz s designs, choosing instead to provide a more balanced and analytical assessment of the greatness of a man he also knew personally. 61 These retrospective statements, while not fully comprehensive, begin to explain the contrasting responses of Green and Barnard in trying to stake out their own positions as Dickens illustrators and deal with the fact that their work would be, for many if not all, inevitably secondary. Paying selective but focused attention to the series of illustrations completed by each artist for one novel, Green s plates for The Old Curiosity Shop ( ) and Barnard s for Bleak House, demonstrates how Green and Barnard s feelings about following Phiz were worked through in practice. In considering Green s approach to his commission in greater depth, it is possible to refer to the extensive preparatory sketches he made for the volume currently held in the VanderPoel Dickens Collection at the University of Texas. One way in which we can interpret these pen and ink drawings is as evidence of the great care and effort Green took in completing the difficult task of coming after the drawings by Browne. There are sketches of numerous characters in various poses, many of which were adopted in the final woodcuts. Three items from the collection, however, merit more extensive discussion. The first of these pieces is a page of initial pen and pencil sketches of Grandfather Trent. What is particularly striking about these images is the minute attention paid to subtly different interpretations of the character s facial features; several did not make it into final drawings. This precision, moreover, demonstrates Green s commitment to a form of realistic portraiture in depicting a face which, according to Dickens, was so deeply furrowed, and so very full of care (see Figure 3). 62 The other two pieces from the collection are more developed, but still preliminary, versions of two of Green s plates from the volume: That, Ladies and Gentlemen, said Mrs. Jarley, Is Jasper Packlemerton of atrocious memory (from Chapter 28; see Figure 4) and The Strong tide filled his throat, and bore him on upon its rapid currents (from Chapter 68). Here, especially in the first instance, we are given further evidence of Green s perfectionism in terms of the positioning of his characters and the composition of his image. In the sketch, Nell and Mrs. Jarley are framed rather high, with the sketchy

18 336 Book History Figure 3. Charles Green, preliminary sketches of the Grandfather. Used by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. crimson rope and the wax-work figures just below the waist rather than breast high as in Dickens s description, 63 while in the published plate the framing and line of sight to Mrs. Jarley s wax-works is more effectively staged. 64 A comparison between Green s published illustrations and the original ones done by Browne, George Cattermole, Daniel Maclise, and Samuel Williams shows how often Green offers a close reworking of the original pictures rather than diverging from them. Of the thirty-nine wood engravings he completed for The Old Curiosity Shop edition, fifteen depict the same scene as Browne or Cattermole in similar, if more realistic, fashion. That Green frequently sticks closely to Browne and Cattermole s example can be interpreted, in one sense, as an act of homage to what had been done so exquisitely before. His tendency to return to the same scenes as his predecessors is, moreover, brought into sharp relief by a comparison with Fred Barnard s choice of scenes and subjects in his work for the Household volume of Bleak House. Of its sixty-one illustrations only three can easily be traced to Browne s originals. What this suggests is that, although Barnard had great respect for the charming undercurrent of graceful composition

19 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 337 Figure 4. Charles Green, preliminary version of That, Ladies and Gentlemen, said Mrs. Jarley, Is Jasper Packlemerton of atrocious memory. Plate for The Old Curiosity Shop (1876). Used by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. and keen sense of beauty in Browne s work, he did not feel restrained by his friend s achievements, preferring instead to offer a restructuring and reinterpretation of Dickens s texts. This last point emphasizes the importance of not overstating the influence of the original illustrators who preceded the Household artists. Another good reason for not privileging references to the pictures by Browne, Cruikshank, Leech, and the others is that the 1870s illustrations functioned as a part of a dense Dickensian cultural web. Dickens s influence extended far beyond the original illustrations. Victorian consumers of culture would likely have encountered versions of Dickens in a number of venues, from political cartoons in periodicals to advertisements, paintings, prints, and even theatrical tableaux. It is difficult to fully reconstruct this popular cultural context from the vantage point of the present day. We can, nonetheless, find some examples of a close relationship between the Household illustrations and other aspects of visual Dickens. Fred Barnard himself, for instance, con-

20 338 Book History tributed to this context before starting work on his commissions for the Household Edition. His 1870 Fun memorial cartoon Charles Dickens s Legacy to England has already been mentioned. Beyond this, he worked as the house cartoonist for Fun in 1869, producing the journal s full-page political cartoon each week. On several occasions there is a clear visual nod to Dickens. Good at Figuring, published April 24, 1869, presents the then Prime Minister William Gladstone as a dancing master. He is instructing a circle of the leading Liberal and Tory figures of the day who are comically pictured as boys and girls, with the Chancellor Robert Lowe doing his figures and Benjamin Disraeli as a pig-tailed young lady about to curtsey. Gladstone s pose, the composition of the group of figures, and the fact that he is called a professor of deportment in the caption all recall the dancing master Prince Turveydrop from Bleak House, especially as he is depicted in Phiz s plate to Chapter 14, The Dancing School. 65 And on May 8, 1869, in Bumble s Banishment; or, What It Must Come to At Last, Barnard depicted Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist as a representation of the Poor Law being kicked down the stairs of a workhouse by John Bull. Beyond the periodicals context, the work of the Household illustrators also visually alludes to some of the many paintings dealing with Dickens subjects exhibited up to Two particularly fine examples of such interpictorial reference can be found in the series of already mentioned illustrations done by Green for The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnard for Bleak House. In the first instance, such allusiveness is perhaps unsurprising given that this was by a substantial margin the most popular of Dickens s novels as far as the art world was concerned, depicted in more than forty paintings. 67 The illustration by Green in question is one of a moment in Chapter 3 entitled When he did sit down, he tucked up his sleeves and squared his elbows and put his face close to his copy-book (see Figure 5). This scene, which shows Nell instructing Kit how to write, was one not chosen by the original illustrators, but it was the subject of a well-known painting by Robert Braithwaite Martineau, Kit s Writing Lesson (1852). Green s black-andwhite wood-engraving lacks the glowing Pre-Raphaelite color and minute attention to detail of Martineau s work. It is also more faithful to the passage from the novel by not showing Nell sewing and making apparent the gloomy presence of the Grandfather during the scene. 68 Beyond these differences, however, it is striking how Green evokes a very similar mood to Martineau in his much simpler image. As in the painting, Kit looks rather clean in the midst of his strenuous efforts with an unfamiliar writing implement; this is rather different from Dickens s text where Master Humphrey

21 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 339 describes how Kit began to wallow in blots, and to daub himself with ink up to the very roots of his hair. 69 And the expression of both characters, as in Martineau s picture, is rather serious, even in the shared small detail of Kit sticking out his tongue in concentration that is not mentioned directly in the novel. The emphasis, therefore, is not on the laughter and fun of the scene, when at every fresh mistake, there was a fresh burst of merriment from the child [Nell] and a louder and not less hearty laugh from poor Kit himself. The accent falls instead on the gentle wish on her part to teach, and an anxious desire on his to learn. 70 A similarly serious, aestheticized response to a Dickens character is evident in Fred Barnard s striking full-page portrait of Jo. This depicts a scene at the end of Chapter 19 in Bleak House, but appeared opposite the title page in the volume editions (see Figure 6). The placement here suggests a possible intertextual link to Phiz s 1853 frontispiece to the first volume edition, also called Jo, which portrays the street urchin leaning against a post glancing at a dog. The style of Barnard s Jo, however, is rather different. Figure 5. Charles Green, When he did sit down, he tucked up his sleeves and squared his elbows and put his face close to his copybook. Plate for The Old Curiosity Shop (1876). Author s collection.

22 340 Book History Figure 6. Fred Barnard, Jo. Plate for Bleak House (1873). Author s collection. It recollects instead another famous image, William Powell Frith s painting The Crossing Sweeper (1858). Though Frith s is not explicitly a Dickens painting, Mark Bills has suggested that the artist had the scene from Chapter 16 of Bleak House in mind when Lady Dedlock uses Jo s crossing. 71 As Bills has noted in his rich contextualization of the painting, it certainly had a wide popular reach, extending to a number of painted versions by Frith, a steel engraving and... a Parian group figure. 72 Rather than any explicit

23 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 341 parallel between the composition of the images (one shows Jo on a crossing with a lady, the other Jo sitting eating beside Blackfriars Bridge), it is their interpretation of Jo s character that is strikingly similar. Bills puts it well when he claims that, in Frith s painting, A street archetype is at once transformed into a human being, deftly painted with all the irony and sentiment that Dickens had so poignantly described in Bleak House. 73 It is this sense of humanity that Barnard picks up so effectively in his startling vignette. At the beginning of the relevant passage in Chapter 19 Dickens describes Jo in rather base terms as munching and gnawing at his repast. 74 Barnard s Jo, on the other hand, is a rather handsome (if ragged) boy with a deeply contemplative look on his face as he gazes towards St. Paul s spire. He is not physically alone in the image, since other figures, including a father with his young son, fill out the frame. His mysterious far-off expression, however, stresses the intellectual and spiritual isolation that Dickens s passage also describes. One small but striking pathetic detail at the heart of the image captures his one comfort: the sovereign given to him by Lady Dedlock clasped in his hand. There is a more general significance to these extended interpictorial connections between Barnard and Green s illustrations and realist paintings of the period. They show again how the Household illustrations can be considered in relation to contexts beyond the engravings done for the serial parts by the original artists. Indeed, it is important that they should be. Although, as we have seen, the image of Dickens was bound up for many of his readers with those little etchings in that endless gallery, it is worth acknowledging that the idea that Dickens s novels have come to seem incomplete without their original illustrations 75 has been in part generated by the publishing practices and scholarship of the second half of the twentieth century. By the early 1860s, on the other hand, the visual style of the generation of artists that included Hablot Browne and George Cruikshank had begun to fall out of artistic fashion and critical favor. With the rise of what Simon Cooke has called the illustrated periodicals of the Sixties, 76 the steel-engraved single page illustrations typical of monthly part fiction were replaced by wood engravings inserted alongside the text. This technological change significantly influenced the style of pictures. The dramatic tableaux group scenes and use of symbolic details that Philip V. Allingham defines as Hablot Browne s visual hallmark in the illustrations for Dickens s earlier novels shifted to a much cleaner and less emblematic look. 77 The Sixties artists provided, therefore, a pared back representation of fewer figures; this is extended in several cases in the Household Edition into striking full-page portraits such as the one of Jo the crossing sweep discussed above.

24 342 Book History With the public s taste shifting to these more decorous forms of realist illustration, Browne and Cruikshank came to be associated with caricature and even exaggeration. Interestingly, two critics have suggestively argued that Dickens himself was aware that the original illustrators gave a reduced impression of his own words. With typical strength of purpose, moreover, he set out to do something about it. Dickens s first strategy was to illustrate his own scenes and characters in the shape of his public readings. As Malcolm Andrews has claimed, To the visual imagination trained by the illustrations [Dickens s characters] were grotesques in fixed postures. But when Dickens brought them from his study to the Reading platform they were living, breathing persons. 78 Andrews suggests that, influenced by changing acting and platform performance styles, Dickens managed this by rehabilitating his old caricatures... in a more low-key manner than expected. 79 The second move by Dickens in turning towards a more naturalistic style was to employ the artist Marcus Stone, who worked in the new Sixties realist manner, to illustrate his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. As Jasper Schelstraete has recently argued in his reassessment of this illustrator s role in the canon of visual Dickens, by hiring Stone, Dickens showed a keen awareness of evolutions in book illustration. He knew that Browne s style had become outdated in the scheme of things, and sought to adjust to the shifts in public taste. 80 Direct evidence of this keen awareness is provided in an 1867 letter to J. T. Fields, in which he commends Sol Eytinge s illustrations for the American publication of Our Mutual Friend, explaining that They are remarkable for a most agreeable absence of exaggeration... and a general modesty and propriety which I greatly like. 81 If he had lived, Dickens might well have also approved of the work of the Household illustrators, similarly defined as it is by absence of exaggeration, general modesty, and propriety. Such speculation aside, it is nonetheless useful to view the Household Edition and its plates in the context of these evolutions in book illustration, and indeed in relation to changing ideas about (literary) representation in general. The edition was strongly influenced by the Sixties realist style, and as we have seen incorporates references to painting in order to transform the detailed and symbolic caricatures of 1840s and 1850s illustration into small-scale works of portraiture. The adoption of this visual mode, as we shall see in due course, eventually affected how readers responded to Dickens. Striking initial evidence of this shift in the reception of (visual) Dickens is provided by returning to the correspondence of one great admirer of the Household Edition, Vincent van Gogh. In his letters Van Gogh frequently

25 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 343 makes reference to the excellent and very beautiful productions of the illustrators of the Household Edition, mentioning Barnard, Green and Mahoney all by name. 82 In a March 1883 letter to Anthon van Rappard he writes very specifically of his perceptions of illustrations to a cheap edition of A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Haunted Man (1848), stories he claims to have read almost every year since [he] was a boy. Here he explains very directly that The illustrations by John Leech and Cruikshank have character too, but the Barnards are more worked up. Leech, though, is strong with street urchins. 83 What is particularly noticeable in Van Gogh s response, however, is how often he draws close comparison between his perception of Dickens and the English black-and-white artists. This cuts both ways. He claims, therefore, in an autumn 1882 letter to Rappard that For me the English draughtsmen are what Dickens is in the sphere of literature. It s one and the same sentiment, noble and healthy, and something one always comes back to. 84 In March 1883, musing on the relationship again, he asserts that In my view there s no other writer who s as much a painter and draughtsman as Dickens. He s one of those whose characters are resurrections. 85 What Van Gogh admired more precisely in English black-andwhite art is explained in an early 1883 letter to his brother Theo. He argues that one is astonished by that steadiness of the drawing, that personal character, that seriousness of approach, and that fathoming and presentation of the most everyday figures and subjects found on the street, on the market, in a hospital or orphanage. 86 Such qualities of sincerity and sober realism are, by extension, present in the writing of that black-and-white artist, Charles Dickens. Given that he writes so often about his admiration for the work of Barnard, Green, and Mahoney, it is possible to argue that his seeing Dickens through their pictures, as it were, contributed to the shaping of this serious realist view of Dickens s fiction. Since, as we have seen, Dickens illustration was already moving towards a more naturalistic style in the 1860s, this shift from the satirical, comic mode was not a radical departure. In the Household illustrations done for the novels of the 1830s and 1840s, however, drawing Dickens s scenes and characters in the Sixties manner was a more noticeable realignment of his style and that of his illustrators. This was done in part, of course, to place Dickens in a more familiar visual context. Adapting Dickens to the changing tastes of his later readers also has the interesting effect of emphasizing structural and tonal elements of the earlier novels not made as obvious by the first illustrators. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge have recently reminded us that when we write about Victorian novels, we often pay mere

26 344 Book History lip service to serial illustration, page layout, and serial breaks, treating them as supplemental rather than intrinsic to these complex texts. Although the serial rhythm of the Household Edition differed from the original monthly parts, and also contained illustrations that succeeded the original ones, this insight still holds true in reading its plates which are constitutive of plot rather than supplemental to it. 87 Analysis of the Household Edition illustrations of two of Dickens s early novels The Old Curiosity Shop and Nicholas Nickleby ( ) shows, in fact, how they bring new emphasis to aspects of the plot and atmosphere of both texts, primarily by reading the early novels through the lens of the later, darker works. Charles Green s series of illustrations to The Old Curiosity Shop are all highly competent reworkings of the originals in a more modern realistic style. As we have seen, Green, strongly aware of his great predecessors, often chose to illustrate the same scenes as the original artists. Of course this does not mean that they are the same illustrations, and in reillustrating the work Green inevitably not only interprets individual scenes in new ways but also colors our interpretation of the whole novel. Working in a strongly realist idiom, he nonetheless chose frequently to replicate the dark plate technique adopted by Browne for the novels from Bleak House onwards to give a sense of the strongly grotesque and Gothic qualities of The Old Curiosity Shop. Of the thirty-nine images he completed, ten are dark plates, many of them focusing on the environs of the curiosity shop itself and the disreputable riverside district in which Quilp s wharf is located. Notable examples include his reworking of the novel s frontispiece depicting Master Humphrey s entry into the odd cluttered shop, and Daniel Quilp sat himself down in a wherry to cross to the opposite shore, an interesting distanced portrayal of the bustling activity of the river which aims to capture Dickens s own atmospheric description at this point in the novel. As well as adopting this technique typically associated with the later novels, by choosing to depict quite different scenes than the original illustrators he also emphasizes different aspects of Dickens s text. This change is especially apparent in the closing phases of the narrative, when Green focuses not on Little Nell s narrative, but on Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness and the scheming of Quilp and the Brasses. Indeed, it is particularly striking given its importance in the reception of the text how little Green focuses on the decline and death of Nell. There is, for example, no depiction of her peacefully at rest in Chapter 71; the last time we see her illustrated is in the baronial country chapel in Chapter 53. One way in which we can explain this absence of a popular figure and narrative is that, after his death, Dickens s early Vic-

27 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 345 torian sense of the pathetic was becoming unfashionable. As George Ford noted, During Dickens s lifetime, the superlatives continued to be lavished upon Nell. Afterwards, however, the vogue of Nell began gradually to decline. 88 Green emphasizes instead the much darker side of Dickens s vision. This fact is made particularly apparent in the choice of subject for the novel s final plate. Rather than the sentimentalized depiction of Nell with the angels which closes the original text, we are given a much gloomier image of the wretched Sally and Solomon Brass as they crawl at dusk from the inmost recesses of St. Giles s and... take their way along the streets with shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms (see Figure 7). 89 As an illustrator Fred Barnard was more attuned than Charles Green to the comic as well as the pathetic potential of Dickens s fiction. Arthur Waugh suggested boldly that the spirit of Boz ran again in his veins, 90 and much of Barnard s qualities as an adapter of Dickens can be attributed to his ability to switch like his author between high humor and a more somber tone. This versatility is certainly evident in his work on another of the early novels, Nicholas Nickleby. A good example of the attention Barnard paid to the novel s broad comedy is provided by his fresh illustration of the scene from Chapter 41 in which the mad old gentleman in the small-clothes from next door climbs on the garden wall in an attempt to woo Mrs. Nickleby. In other new scenes Barnard chose to depict, however, his most striking addition was to emphasize the darker elements of the text. He achieved this by showing a pronounced and subtle interest in illustrating Ralph Nickleby in the second half of his series of plates for the novel, and in so doing alters the emphasis of our reading of it. Ralph is of course present in a number of the group scenes depicted in Browne s later illustrations for the novel, such as Mr. Mantalini poisons himself for the seventh time in Chapter 44. What is distinctive, in contrast, about the number of scenes Barnard chose to illustrate is that they are individual portraits of Ralph brooding alone which effectively adopt Browne s dark plate technique. The first one, from Chapter 34, shows Ralph sitting in his office, with his brain still harping on the same theme, and still pursuing the same unprofitable reflections about the angry letter disowning him which he has recently received from Nicholas. Having been scattered... into atoms, the letter can clearly be seen in pieces on the floor beneath him (see Figure 8). 91 The illustration is effective in several ways. Especially in the way he drew his facial expression, Barnard managed to realistically capture the essential appearance of Ralph, described elsewhere in the novel as Stern, unyielding, dogged, and impenetrable. 92 Barnard also provided some symbolic and proleptic touches in

28 346 Book History Figure 7. Charles Green, Two wretched people were more than once observed to crawl at dusk from the inmost recesses of St. Giles. Plate for The Old Curiosity Shop (1876). Author s collection. Figure 8. Fred Barnard, Night found him at last, still harping on the same theme, and still pursuing the same unprofitable reflections. Plate for Nicholas Nickleby (1875). Author s collection.

29 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 347 Figure 9. Fred Barnard, Clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerly in, wondering which might be his grave. Plate for Nicholas Nickleby (1875). Author s collection. illustrating the room s décor. The bar-like sash windows behind Ralph reinforce how much his cold acquisitiveness has trapped him both emotionally and psychologically, while the noose-like blind string hints at his eventual death by hanging. The next time we see Ralph alone is in the two illustrations for Chapter 62, which builds up to his suicide. The fact that Barnard thought the chapter should have two illustrations is significant in itself, and shows his fascination with this dark and psychologically perceptive part of an otherwise optimistic novel. In the first striking image, we are shown Ralph not sitting inside, as in the plate for Chapter 34, but rather kept out as he holds onto the iron railings of a poor, mean burial-ground (see Figure 9). 93 In a rare moment of selflessness he remembers being on a jury which had

30 348 Book History consigned a suicide there, before blankly staring in, wondering eagerly and eerily which might be his grave once he commits the same act. 94 The next illustration functions in a similar and perhaps even gloomier fashion. It is given the same title as the chapter, Ralph makes one last appointment and keeps it. It refers to a moment in the narrative not fully described by Dickens s narrator, when Ralph fixes his eye steadily on the hook from which he will hang himself. Alone and framed by the useless objects of the lumber room that surround him, he stares up, in the last of a series of stares, with a look of grim concentration. These short case studies clarify that how Dickens was interpreted in the illustrations of the 1870s already differed from the time of his first appearance in the 1830s. Surveying the critical response to Dickens illustrations up to the early years of the twentieth century, moreover, it becomes apparent that the tastes of readers and critics sympathetic to Dickens continued to move away from a preference for the 1830s and 1840s style of artists like Cruikshank and Browne. For a critic of illustration like J.A. Hammerton, writing in 1912, the original illustrators were still familiar, since No English writer of fiction is so curiously associated with the illustrators of his work as Dickens. 95 The association, however, was a problematic one since, for Hammerton, It is on the shoulders of Phiz that a good deal of the blame which thoughtless critics too often place upon Dickens should rest. The charge of being an exaggerator of character, or a caricaturist, is, of all the parrot cries, the commonest raised against Dickens. 96 Since the 1960s critics like Jane Cohen, Robert Patten, and Michael Steig have shown us that such comments oversimplify Browne s talents. At the start of the twentieth century, however, Hammerton was not alone in his opinions. Edwin Pugh, whose observations about the inevitably right and fitting Household Edition illustrations began this article, wrote in particularly heated terms about the distorting effect of the original plates, which are as unlike the creations of the Master s brain as a painted, stuffed wax effigy is unlike the warm, breathing body of a beautiful woman or man. He concludes That they damaged Dickens s reputation almost irremediably I do verily believe. 97 For Pugh and other critics who shared similar views, then, the illustrations commissioned for the Household Edition were preferable to the originals. They did not result in an association of Dickens s writings with the perceived exaggerated and caricatured illustration style of a much earlier era, but rather highlighted his great realistic ability in drawing a human character faithfully and truly and providing transcripts of nature in

31 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 349 his descriptions of urban life. 98 The Household illustrations were, in other words, much more in tune with the dominant perceptions of Dickens current in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. As the following, final section of the article will show, their neglected influence can be traced in the culture of these years, even if it was to sharply drop off in the middle years of the twentieth century. Towards the end of his Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, John Harvey offers an informative brief survey... of the later history of the original illustrations. Despite this focus he mentions in passing the monumental Household Edition. He concludes, however, that its influence upon later editions was slight; as he puts it, if there was an attempt to make the Household plates the classic illustrations for later editions of Dickens, it did not succeed. 99 He is partly right. Chapman and Hall did continue to use the original illustrations in many of the editions that came out after Indeed for the one that immediately followed the Household Edition, the Illustrated Library Edition ( ), they returned to the original plates. With the intention of presenting Dickens in a really handsome library form, Chapman and Hall made sure that the page will be of a size to admit of the introduction of all the original illustrations. 100 Since each volume sold for 10s., however, the Illustrated Library Edition was clearly aimed at a different section of the market from the Household Edition. It was actually the plates from the latter that tended to be reprinted for the popular market. The illustrations of the Household Edition did not, in other words, fade into obscurity as some accounts have suggested. They enjoyed, rather, a rich afterlife which extended into the early years of the twentieth century. Their influence can be seen most directly in the illustrated popular reprints released by Chapman and Hall and other firms. It can also be traced, perhaps more surprisingly, in various examples from the (popular) culture of the day, including an illustration exhibition and the work of a well-known Dickens impersonator on the music hall stage. A full account of these dense cultural networks must begin with the various reprint series that appeared just before the completion of the Household Edition itself in This process began in 1877 when Chapman and Hall reused illustrations from the Household Edition in their shilling and sixpenny paperback reprints, finally answering the demands of the working man who had written to the Daily News in A March 16, 1877, advertisement in the Publishers Circular announced that a new short series of illustrated volumes of Dickens s works (including The Pickwick Papers,

32 350 Book History Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby) was to be released between March and May of that year at 2 shillings per volume. 101 Evidence from the English Catalogue of Books for that year shows, however, that when they actually appeared they cost 1s. a volume. By spring 1878 Chapman and Hall began to produce an even cheaper 6d. series, which reproduced one of the Household plates on a colored cover but included no illustrations inside. On April 16, 1878, aware of the approaching expiry of the copyright to Dickens s earliest works, they also made an agreement giving Routledge privileged access to the stereotype plates and cover blocks for the shilling and sixpenny editions Chapman and Hall had just released. 102 In these editions, from the summer of 1878 until 1885, the name of George Routledge and Sons appeared on the title page as well as that of Chapman and Hall. 103 Consultation of early 1880s cheap editions published under this joint agreement shows that the Shilling Edition became the Author s Copyright Edition, and that the sixpenny volumes were issued first as the Author s Complete Edition before finally becoming Routledge s Sixpenny Novels once they started appearing without the name of Chapman and Hall on the title page (Figure 10). 104 Amongst this increasing number of different publishers and series, the treatment of the illustrations in popular editions of Dickens s Christmas Books deserves further comment. These particular volumes not only republish the Household illustrations; interestingly they print them alongside some of those from the original issue by John Leech. In a March 1883 letter to Anthon van Rappard, Vincent van Gogh mentions what seems to be one of these composite paperbacks, noting how This week I bought a new 6-penny edition of Christmas carol and Haunted man by Dickens (London Chapman and Hall) with about 7 illustrations by Barnard and subsequently discussing Barnard and Leech in his text. 105 Copies of A Christmas Carol and The Chimes held by the British Library certainly follow this pattern. They include the statement With Illustrations by John Leech and F. Barnard on their colored covers, and print a mixture of 1840s and 1870s images (both use a frontispiece by Barnard). 106 We cannot fully reconstruct the commercial or aesthetic intentions of the publisher in creating this edition. Nonetheless this combination of illustrations by different hands suggests intriguingly that, alongside a likely fondness for Leech s original plates, a demand was developing for Barnard s images as well. Chapman and Hall may have made an agreement with Routledge in 1878, but this did not mean that they neglected their own editions. Indeed they launched their own new popular series aimed at a slightly different

33 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 351 Figure 10. Cover of the Routledge Sixpenny Series volume of Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (n.d.). Author s collection. section of the market late in This was the Popular Library Edition, its name a clear reference to the more expensive Illustrated Library Edition. Since it was printed from the stereo plates of the Library Edition and appeared in crown octavo, this was not accidental. 107 There was, however, one key difference: the Household plates were included instead of the original illustrations alongside the typeset page of the Illustrated Library Edition. As their half-page advertisement in the Publishers Circular shows, Chapman and Hall were keen to promote it as both a cheaper form of the Library Edition and a more handsome version of the Household Edition. They explained that, for a price of 3s. 6d. (6d. cheaper than the Household volumes), This edition will be printed on good paper, and contain Illustra-

34 352 Book History tions that have appeared in the Household Edition, printed on Plate Paper. Each volume will consist of about 450 pages of Letterpress and 16 Full-page Illustrations. 108 The English Catalogue of Books for 1881 shows that this composite edition was a success, since it was reprinted, alongside a reissued Household Edition, in its entirety in the April of that year at the increased price of 4s. In 1890 Chapman and Hall once more repeated their strategy of publishing concurrent editions with different illustrations. According to a 1901 New York Times account of Collected English Editions of His Works Since the Original One, this year saw the publication of both the Crown Edition and the Pictorial Edition. The former, in large crown octavo priced at 5s., consisted of 17 maroon cloth volumes containing reproductions of all the original illustrations. The Pictorial Edition, on the other hand, was a royal octavo reprint of the famous Household Edition with the double rules round the page of type omitted. The Pictorial Edition was a smaller version of its popular predecessor, a point confirmed by its appearance, frequency, and price: It contained all the illustrations of the Household Edition, and was issued in 39 monthly parts... and 17 red cloth volumes at 3s. 6d. each. 109 It also seems likely that the Pictorial Edition was the basis for another subsequent 6d. edition, published in 1909 by Edward Lloyd (see Figure 11). These light-green octavo-sized paperbacks include a note opposite the title page explaining that Lloyd s Sixpenny Dickens is published by arrangement with Chapman and Hall, Ltd. As well as reprinting the Household Edition illustrations, the volumes feature a colored plate by the later artists pasted to the front cover. The covers also rather surprisingly state with the original illustrations, perhaps a marketing ruse on Lloyd s part. It also suggests that, almost 40 years after the Household Edition began appearing, its 1870s illustrations had come to seem as old-fashioned and therefore original as Browne and Cruikshank were to the readers of the 1870s. 110 The popular posthumous editions of Dickens reveal that the unusual size and format of the Household Edition were not repeated. The convenience of smaller editions had won out over the handsome but unwieldy volumes of the 1870s edition. The illustrations from within the pages of the Household Edition, however, did live on in the popular editions. There is also evidence of the influence of the Household illustrations in the wider culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Two particular illustrations by Fred Barnard, for example, persist outside of the context of images that function as part of a series illustrating a text. The first of these is his

35 Household Edition of Charles Dickens 353 Figure 11. Cover of Oliver Twist volume of Lloyd s Sixpenny Dickens (1909). Author s collection. frontispiece to the Household Edition version of John Forster s The Life of Charles Dickens (1879), which depicts a distraught Dickens slumped over his work table at Warren s Blacking Factory. As Gerard Curtis has shown, such favourite melodramatic moments from the young Dickens s life had already been illustrated in moralistic children s journals such as Little Folks before Barnard created his more famous image. 111 It then became a hagiographic staple... featuring in countless articles. 112 Indeed Barnard s image continues to be reprinted now, for example in two recent important biographical studies. 113 The second influential illustration is his full-page

36 354 Book History Figure 12. Fred Barnard, He had been Tim s bloodhorse all the way from church, and had come home rampant. Plate for A Christmas Carol (1878). Author s collection. Figure 13. Binding of Lord Mayor Treloar s Edition of A Christmas Carol (1907). The British Library Board. Shelfmark fff.2.